Total Pageviews

Monday, November 21, 2016

Fat calories count most in obesity ~ new study

Conventional wisdom, at least from the media and the high
priests of public health nutrition, tells us that sugar causes obesity and all
its ailments to the point where it is likened to tobacco in its sinister
provenance and its foul health implications. Sugar is to be taxed and
restricted in every way and politicians of all persuasions win popular support
for their call for yet more extreme measures to decry the putative effects of
sugar. And all the time, this conventional wisdom is promoted by the media and
by celebrity chefs and diet gurus.. So it should come as no surprise that when
a study from a high quality group using high quality data, publish a high
quality paper in a high quality journal, which flies in the face of
conventional wisdom, that this fine data, is simply ignored.

The paper[1]
is based on data from the UK Biobank database that tracks individuals over time
(2011 and 2012). It uses direct measures of body weight and height and classified
the 132,479 subjects into underweight, normal weight, overweight and obese with
obesity further divided into grades I, II and III obesity. Data were also
obtained for each subject on % body fat and on waist circumference. Dietary
data was collected using four 24-hour recalls over 2011 and 2012. Subjects were
excluded from the study if there was any possibility that their diet or weight
might be compromised in some way. For example, smokers, who tend to be under-weight,
were excluded, as were those with a reported energy intake deemed by
international norms to indicate under-reporting of calorie intake.

The bottom line in the findings was that moving across
increasing grades of either body weight or body fat, energy intake, as in
calories per day, also increased. As I have previously paraphrased US President
Bill Clinton in his election campaign: “It’s the calories, stupid!” Compared
with normal BMI, obese participants had 11.5% higher total energy intake and 15%,
14%, 10% and 5% higher intake from fat, protein, starch and sugar,
respectively. Hence, the proportion of energy derived from fat was higher (34.3
v. 33.4) but from sugar was lower (22.0 v. 23.4).

This simply tells us there is a direct positive association
between calorie intake and rising levels of overweight. A key question remains
as to the contribution of fat and carbohydrate (with sugar specifically in mind)
to obesity when we statistically control for the calorie intake. The authors
thus transformed the data to control for the following: sex, ethnicity,
physical activity and calorie intake.This
allows us look at data where fat intake and sugar intake are examined for their
links to obesity where caloric intake is controlled to a common level. Now we
see that when sugar intake and starch intake (all carbohydrates) are compared
across rising levels of obesity, they actually fall. In contrast,
fat rises.
This isn’t anything new because when energy intake is fixed at a constant point,
as one contributor to caloric intakes rise (e.g. fat) others, (carbohydrates
including sugar) falls, a fact recorded so many times (the sugar-fat see-saw)
and so repeatedly ignored by the anti-sugar lobby. The figures below are taken from the journal where quintiles if nutrient intake are compared to BMI.

The authors conclude as follows from their research:

Key Messages

• Adiposity is associated with higher intake of sugar; but
the association is stronger for fat intake and strongest for total energy
intake.

• Fat is the largest contributor to overall energy intake.

• There is only a weak correlation between absolute energy
derived from sugar and from fat. Therefore, targeting high sugar consumers will
not necessarily target high consumers of fat and overall energy.

• Focusing public health messages on sugar consumption may
mislead the public on the need to reduce fat intake and overall energy intake.

This was a study funded by a University of
Glasgow internal grant and was not funded by the sugar lobby nor have the
authors any conflict of interest to report. But it doesn’t conform to
conventional wisdom so it will largely remain ignored by the media and senior
policy makers will find it awkward reading, if at all, because they have
already followed
the herd of the anti-sugar lobby.

Translate

"Ever seen a fat fox ~ Human obesity explored"

About Me

I graduated from University College Dublin in 1971 with an Masters in Agricultural Chemistry, took a PhD at Sydney University in 1976 and joined the University of Southampton Medical School as a lecturer in human nutrition in 1977. In 1984 I returned to Ireland to take up a post at the Department of Clinical Medicine Trinity College Dublin and was appointed as professor of human nutrition. In 2006 I left Trinity and moved to University College Dublin as Director of the UCD Institute of Food and Health. I am a former President of the Nutrition Society and I've served on several EU and UN committees on nutrition and Health. I have published over 350+ peer reviewed scientific papers in Public Health Nutrition and Molecular Nutrition and am principal investigator on several national and EU projects (www.ucd.ie/jingo; www.food4me.org). My popular books are "Something to chew on ~ challenging controversies in human nutrition" and "Ever seen a fat fox: human obesity explored"